About the Site
Evan’s Brain Dump is a film editing site almost as much for my benefit as for anyone else’s. During the course of a film, I invariably try new workflows, come up with solutions or workarounds to technical problems, or learn a nifty trick that warrants a bit of publicity. Therefore, these articles are designed to help me document and remember these new things I do as an editor or assistant editor, since it’s very easy to let valuable information slip away during the chaos we normally work in. If anything in here is helpful to anyone else, that would make me very happy. Any files I attach to my articles may be used free of charge, without attribution, and modified at will. If you do find something useful, or if what I write here solves a problem for you, do drop me a note to say hello. It’s always nice to know that you’ve helped someone out.
About Me
Originally from Syracuse, NY, I started my career in the film industry at the age of 16, between my junior and senior years of high school, with an internship at Stan Winston Studio. After graduating from high school and being accepted into USC’s film production program, SWS hired me back to do tech support as their Systems Administrator. I worked there part-time for all four years of college and full-time for one year after, in the process helping to set up their visual effects department, SW Digital, as well as giving a hand anywhere I could. It’s a place where you can wear as many hats as you want to fit on your head, and one of my favorite “not in my job description” tasks I volunteered for was to help solder multi-color LEDs into and then assemble a robot head for AI. Stan Winston Studio was a fantastic place to work, full of amazing people with whom I am very proud to be associated.
During college, though, I got bit by the editing bug. I found that, above creature or visual effects, I loved sitting in the editing bay for hours on end putting my student films together. So a year after college, and five years after starting my job at Stan Winston’s, I left to pursue editing full-time. It was slow at first, but through some family connections, friends I made at SWS, and a bit of luck, I got my first few jobs as an assistant editor, and things have taken off from there.
Some selected credits as an editor or assistant editor include:
- Towards Darkness – Editor
- Hellboy 2 – 1st Assistant Editor
- Rambo – 1st Assistant Editor
- Pan’s Labyrinth – 1st Assistant Editor (U.S.)
- Rocky Balboa – 2nd Assistant Editor
And as of April 2009 I’m just about to start work as the 1st Assistant Editor on a film called Warrior.
After Warrior I would like to take the next step in my career and move up to an Editor classification. I feel like it’s time, despite how much I enjoy the very different type of work that being an assistant editor requires me to do. Nonetheless, I will always be a techie, and the creation of this site provides me a way to record all the useful and useless technical things I’ve had to learn to do my job. It’s a dry read for most, I’m sure, but hopefully at some point it will save someone a bit of time.
Thanks for reading.
April 2, 2009
Bernat Vilaplana, Guillermo del Toro, Gyula Mózes, and me